Anti-status Quo Attitudes and Americans' Support for Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: Attitudes towards Populism, Democracy, and Autocracy

Abstract

Does anger at government performance in a democracy translate into anti-democratic attitudes? This question is important to democratic resilience but does not have a clear causal answer or an answer that incorporates recent advances in how to assess citizen support for democratic backsliding. Using an original nationally representative survey we show that negative assessment of the current system are negatively correlated with support for specific components of backsliding. Across three survey experiments we show that primes which denounce recent trends in American culture and governance negatively affect satisfaction with democracy and perceptions that this country is governed democratically, but do not affect support for democracy. We argue this reinforces existing evidence that citizens can separate short term performance from regime preferences. Our findings suggest the causal channel through which poor government performance translates into democratic erosion may be more complex than previously thought. In addition, by examining evaluations of ”how government works” instead of simple economic retrospection we argue Americans are able to make nuanced distinctions between democracy as a regime type and the flawed realities of real world governance.

Authors

• Andrew I Thompson, University of Pennsylvania

• Daniel Markovits, Columbia University